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Friday, March 6, 2009

Continued Problems in the Forum

First, an apology. As many of you are aware, we continue to have ongoing technical difficulties with the forum. Our technical staff is on the case and they are working as hard as they can.

Now, a tsk-tsk to overzealous forum members.Here at UNOtips.org, we don't like to scold, but it's hard not to say, "We told you so." So let's review the objective of the UNOtips forum. We built the forum as a way for people to share tips and tricks on how to play UNO. It's for UNO lovers, by UNO lovers. It's not a place for you to complain about your job, gloat about your favorite sport team's most recent victory, or engage in endless exchanges about Babylon 5 and Star Trek Voyager. It's built for UNO.

And since it's a moderated forum, our volunteers have to patrol this content. Not to get too technical here, but in essence, all of these off-topic posts bring the system down as our moderators need to use some very clunky technology to find and delete these posts.

So, for every fifteen posts about VHS vs Betamax, our volunteers have to delete the posts and republish the index fifteen times. And that slows the system down for everybody.

Finally, some good news.UNOtips recently received a significant grant from one of our long-standing members to help solve this problem. In the coming months, we will be using the funds from this grant to rebuild our forum technology from the ground up. Our hope is to have almost fully automated moderation (the goal here is to reduce the number of volunteers from fifteen to two) and a much larger server on which to store the data. Target launch date is currently September 1st, 2009.

In the mean time, we should be able to get the forum working again, so keep those UNO tips coming!